I Watched It So You Don't Have To: Singapore Sling
As with all of the films in our I Watched It… series, we strongly encourage you to watch these movies if you’re interested. We’re just here to prepare you for what you’re getting yourself into.
In all of my time watching shock cinema, I’ve found that my favorite selections are the ones that didn’t set out to be shocking. The films that were aiming to make squeamish the steeliest viewers aren’t really what landed me – though I will never pretend they didn’t have an effect on me. Movies that were telling a story through the grotesque and the weird, and still managed to get out that story tend to be where my tastes lie. Which is exactly what I liked about Singapore Sling (1990).
Made with a skewed comedic sensibility and a style filtered through so many lenses of cinema, Singapore Sling became its own unique beast. Director Nikos Nikolaidis was surprised himself to hear people’s visceral reactions to the film and upon hearing it was being banned in several countries was quoted as saying, “when I was shooting Singapore Sling, I was under the impression that I was making a comedy with elements taken from Ancient Greek Tragedy... Later, when some European and American critics characterized it as 'one of the most disturbing films of all times,' I started to feel that something was wrong with me. Then, when British censors banned its release in England, I finally realized that something is wrong with all of us.”
Mother (Michele Valley) and Daughter (Meredyth Herold) are the two driving forces in this story, with Daughter semi-narrating while also being pulled along for the ride. She and Mother have an incestuous relationship and play murderous BDSM games with each other and their poor servants. In fact, the first we as the audience see of them is the two half naked digging a pit in the rain to bury a freshly-disemboweled chauffeur. Through narration and flashbacks, we learn that the deceased father of this family set the sick tone years back, raping Daughter when she was eleven and slaughtering servants at will. His mummified corpse is still kept around by the woman. For any of you wondering… yes, of course, they have sex with it.
When a wounded detective (Panos Thanassoulis) comes across the palatial mansion of these two women, he is pulled into their web and put through all types of torture. The detective, referred to as Singapore Sling because of a cocktail recipe the duo find in his pocket, is madly in love with a woman named Laura (shadows of Gene Tierney, for sure) of whom Daughter closely resembles. Unbeknownst to Singapore Sling, Laura was previously killed by the two women who draped her intestines around their kitchen following the act.
Daughter is drawn to the detective, both because she is lonely and because she is tired of being controlled by her mother. She visits Singapore Sling where he is bound and confesses her feelings to him. Also, she vomits on him, which was the style at the time. As the detective recovers, she plots with him to kill Mother, moving him into the sadistic role the maternal figure held. Singapore Sling and Daughter reenact the killing of Laura but Singapore has attached a large knife to his penis and stabs Daughter repeatedly in a moment of copulation. You get it, right? Yeah, you get it.
Before she dies, Daughter shoots Singapore Sling and he stumbles out into the garden, dressed in her mother’s clothes with a bloody knife dangling between his legs. He collapses and the movie ends with all three characters gruesome deaths.
The world of Singapore Sling doesn’t resemble any one in our reality. It takes the most over the top elements of film noir, greek tragedy, arthouse indie dialogue, and familial relations, blending this into an amalgamation the viewer can’t quite pin down. The gore looks to be real intestines and the vomit was a sweet, clumpy mixture that by all accounts tasted great. On screen it looked suitably repulsive and like a terrible sticky thing to have to clean off of bandages wrapped around one’s face. This certainly won’t be clocked as the most disgusting film people reading this column have ever seen, but the close-to-the-bone quality of the viscera does push up the grotesque factor. The intestines and organs are slippery and shiny; the blood is clotted and thick; the vomit too.
My guess with this movie is that having all these elements (incest, rape, BDSM, torture, gore, bodily expulsions etc) is what moved it over the edge and caused for the ban. Singapore Sling came out in 1990, so by this point the world had experienced a good chunk of widely-distributed shock cinema. The gleeful quality of Mother especially adds to the depravity of the film, and begs the question: did she end up with the sadistic father because she was like this? Daughter seems to be more on the fence and there’s a feeling that she’s a product of her environment, hoping to stay in her mother’s good graces. Mother truly enjoys every moment of it, though by the end all three characters are losing their grasp on reality.
As we say with every movie discussed on Back Row, it’s best to see it for yourself and not take our word for it. For Singapore Sling, there’s so much to look at and revel in that even someone who doesn’t appreciate the more extreme version of cinema could watch this with their eyes being covered for several choice moments. Staged and shot like a film noir with theatrical elements that come across like a play, Singapore Sling is singular in its vision if nothing else. It had me from the throat by the beginning and its weird, wet (I mean this in several different ways but you’ll have to watch it to totally understand) world is horrifying and enticing. Like Salo or many of the giallos, this is a movie that keeps aesthetics in mind and plays out disgusting scenes in beautiful ways. And as we all know by now, when it comes to shocking fare, beautiful gore will always be my top choice.
